Leonine Chameleons: Relativism and Fascism

You have probably lost track of the number of articles about people who have jettisoned family members over contradictory and reprehensible political views. How do we get to the point that educated people, some skilled in philosophical argumentation, fail to make communicative progress with others? As the U.S. sinks further into fascism, why haven’t philosophers’ arguments against fascism caused fascists to do a regretful volte-face? Are non-fascist philosophers ill-equipped to deal with fascism? I ask those questions mindful of Stanley Cavell’s statement that “Nothing a philosopher says can insure that you will not act immorally.”

My proposition is that some philosophers, long smitten with the false notion that philosophers are not sophists or rhetoricians, believe that professional philosophers are superior creatures who, unlike sophists, don’t do things for money, and have no truck with relativism. Centuries ago, philosophers felt a need to run from relativism like plantation owners who’d rather have you think of their property as a wedding venue rather than an old slavery site. Thus, philosophers wrote their own flattering backstory.

According to Jacqueline de Romilly, “What Plato calls ‘rhetoric’ was but a low and second-rate offspring of philosophy.” As Håkan Tell and Christopher Moore tell the history, Plato has the tale exactly backwards. The rhetoricians and sophists were not inferiors who came after the origin of philosophy, rather philosophers envied the sophists. As Christopher Moore puts it, “The name philosophos seems to have begun as ‘sage-wannabe,’ a bemused label for a person’s repetitive and presumed excessive efforts to join the category of sophoi.” Kojin Karatani (“Socrates is better understood as a Sophist from Athenian soil”) and Barbara Cassin (the Sophists are philosophy’s “bad” repressed “other”) corroborate this perspective.

It’s philosophy’s alleged retrospective split with sophists/relativism that leaves philosophers at a loss when engaging with the current iteration of fascism in the U.S., especially regarding its potent, disarming weapon: relativism. First, if the point of philosophical analysis is to tighten up what we say, à la Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” the discourse of a relativist skilled in variability comes across by comparison as logorrheic. The relativist can be a chatterbox. Think of this as the oratorical equivalent of Steve Bannon’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” Second, historically philosophers have not been consistent defenders of noisy democracies. For centuries, philosophers from Plato (Book VI of the Republic: “Everyone is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation”) to John Stuart Mill (“the tyranny of the majority”) have been skeptical about democracy. Even champions of the people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau worry that the “general will” (The Social Contract II.3) could be manipulated and misinterpreted.

At the core of modern philosophy is the argument. Philosophical debate is frequently over arguments, their logic, their validity, etc. It’s easy to forget Zeev Sternhell’s point that fascism is a “revolt against the Enlightenment,” and that includes reasoned, evidentiary argument familiar to philosophers. In a battle of political expressiveness, via bumper stickers, car magnets, competing slogans on baseball caps, T-shirts, and social media postings, persuasion is often hardly the point.

A famous line from Friedrich Nietzsche captures the moment: “The time is coming when we will relearn politics.” Why relearning is necessary appears in a Guardian headline warning people in the UK—during the same week that a man who deserves a belated entry in al-Jawbarī’s Book of Charlatans, George Santos, began serving a prison term—to prepare for a “blizzard of lies” from Nigel Farage and his right-wing supporters. Despite the lessons from Italian fascism, such as the ascendency of a financial oligarchy opposed to working class interests, Italian fascism arose accompanied by a philosophical program, and from the National Socialist period, which sought its philosophical underpinnings later, many of us lack strategies to dismantle the Fiction Factory that is the contemporary far-right, a shift arguably enabled by philosophy’s experiments with anti-foundationalism and humanists’ investments in “creative non-fiction.”

Witness the media’s indulgence of far-right ipsedixitism and the reluctance of the media to call lies by that name. Instead, we are fed euphemisms, like “Trump’s imaginary numbers” (Washington Post) or “Trump offers no evidence to support claim” (ABC News). In short, journalists have never recovered from Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts.”

It can be a mistake to imagine fascists mean what they say—think of the famous Cavell essay—despite fascists saying the exact opposite thing a week or six months later. The accumulation of lies and reversals ought to end the delusion that fascists respect civil discourse and halt the expectation of truthfulness. It often doesn’t. Thus, frustration from an inability to retain equilibrium amidst the rip tides of relativism.

While appreciating a strategy adopted by scholars like Sternhell and  A. James Gregor (Mussolini’s Intellectuals), who insist on a cognitive wall between Italian fascism and National Socialism, I suggest that the far-right in the U.S. has adopted, both deliberately and unconsciously, primary elements of both Italian fascism (e.g., Caesarism) and National Socialism (e.g., eugenics and racism), reinforcing a long-standing conception, acknowledged by Gregor, that tends to merge holistically Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany under one umbrella called fascism.

Contemporary non-academics will likely be confused by Sternhell’s claim that “fascism can in no way be identified with Nazism.” That academic distinction hasn’t stopped Republicans from mixing together features of both. Consequently, what we say these days, invoking a point made by Toril Moi about ordinary language philosophy, i.e., that we’re talking about “language as the medium in which we live our lives,” occurs in a context in which “Nazism” and “fascism” are generally undifferentiated.

Such blending is not unique to the present. Laurence Rees points out that the nascent stages of National Socialism involved following the lead of the fascist Benito Mussolini, whom the current President has been encouraged to admire, and whose 1921 essay on relativism calls for revisiting.

Mussolini’s essay “Relativism and Fascism,” brought to my attention by Geoff Waite, appears in the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. There, Mussolini praises “antiverità,” or anti-truth, showing his contempt for those who claim to be the bearers of objective truth, and claiming that fascism’s strength is in its ability to change its positions as circumstances change (relativism). It’s what lets some people complain about protestors wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and then the same people defend the wearing of masks by ICE as people are kidnapped off U.S. streets. 

Foreseeing the chance to enact a major disturbance, Mussolini writes about “shattering all the political categories.” He tells his audience to simply reject what he and his Italian fascists do not like, as well as anything that harms them. He directs readers to create and to impose what they want on others. This is a right (“il diritto”). Mussolini concludes his essay with an explicit bow to Nietzsche’s The Will to Power.

The far-right seeks a triumph of the will. The aim is to compel others to do as they say, not to win debates at the Oxford Union, nor to be logical and consistent.

Mussolini alters some ancient presuppositions about truth that extend back to Plato’s Phaedrus, in which the alleged relativists (then called “Sophists”) kept track of their discourse in writing. Writing worried Plato and Socrates for several of the reasons truth troubles Mussolini. Mussolini insists that the truth is static, but relativism is always a means for endless renewal—relativism is alive, truth dead. Remember Plato’s complaint that words in writing sit there and do nothing, whereas if the speaker of a claim were available, that speaker could be questioned, and the matter would be alive, interrogable.  Socrates: “Every speech must be put together like a living creature” (264c).

U.S. Republicans have resurrected Mussolini’s kind of relativism, partly because their leader, repudiating Christ as the Lamb of God, became enamored years ago of a fake Mussolini quotation: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”

Not all relativisms are fascist, but all fascisms embrace relativism. The philosopher Joseph Margolis attempts to lay out the variety of relativisms in The Truth about Relativism. Yet, Margolis, apparently unaware of Mussolini’s essay on the topic, mentions in the chapter “Classification Run Riot” that he is as frustrated as anyone about perennially simplistic characterizations of relativism. Mussolini’s flavor of relativism, inherited from Nietzsche, ought to alarm people about fascist relativism’s power, which pre-insulates itself from truth and persuasion.

Leo Strauss confirms that Mussolini’s relativism is Nietzsche’s relativism: “One can say that Nietzsche is the most important intellectual ancestor of fascism” (from the Leo Strauss Transcript Project, section on Beyond Good and Evil, the subtitle of which is “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future”). In an essay on relativism published in 1961, Strauss writes: “Nietzsche is the philosopher of relativism.”

Mussolini, Leo Strauss, Strauss’ West Coast groupies, and contemporary anti-truthers aid and abet Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the future,” in which they foresee a lion ruling over sheep. To counter that prefiguration, perhaps philosophers can take some lessons from Mussolini’s essay, one of which might be that the fascists feel it is their right to reject engagement in debate, and to impose on others what they wish, regardless of how correct the others’ logic is or how watertight the argumentation. William Gairdner reveals the upshot of such tactics: “It is plainly impossible for human beings to form a community of any kind whatsoever when all their judgments are relative.”

Luckily, history can help. Mussolini had enemies who thought carefully about undoing his aims. Antonio Gramsci, for instance, spotted the problem of fascist relativism as early as May, 1918.  Also, Palmiro Togliatti’s Lectures on Fascism, which he gave in 1935, is available in English. The book contains numerous counter-strategies applicable to the present, such as an increased “stress on the fascist dictatorship’s class character” (rather than, say, focusing on the behaviors of individuals within the dictatorship), as well as confirmation of the importance of relativism to fascism: “Nothing more closely resembles a chameleon than fascist ideology.”